Count me in the social media optimization camp, any day!

In the discussion over search engine optimization vs social media optimization, I’m staking out my position … count me in the social media optimization camp, any day!

Now, I understand what the folks who focus on search engine optimization are saying about the benefits of tweaking the content to fit the algorithms driving the search engine world. But, social media optimization is about so much more than that … it’s fundamentally about community, about building community around products or services or ideas, community that is based on trust and credbility and recommendation.

I may not be the best person to articulate this, so for the sake of reference I’d point to the clear difference in the Wikipedia definitions of search engine optimization vs social media optimization as evidence.

While both have a desired end result of increasing web traffic, SEO “considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure …” SMO, on the other hand, “is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.”

The former relies on a “system” of analysis of algorithms and patterns, the second relies on the strength of recommendations and sharing within networked communities.

For me, while search engine optimization of content is not to be sniffed at, it is far outweighed by the value of social media optimization of content, which builds a community based on bookmarked and shared recommendations that becomes the Web 2.0 version of a list of highly “qualified leads.” You know these people understand, are interested in and are primed to pay attention to your product, solution or ideas. You can put a price on what it costs to search engine optimize your content, but the value of a community of qualified leads who are paying attention to what you do is priceless!

It was way back in June that I posted a reference to Joel Postman’s mention of a comment by Robert Scoble during a social media summit in Baja California. I was particularly struck by Joel’s quote of Scoble characterizing search-engine optimization as “salt on a nice pasta meal,” which Scoble confirmed to me he’d said (more or less) in a subsequent email.

At the time, I thought it was clever … I now confess I’m finally getting what Scoble meant. And, what he and Shel Israel identified in their book, Naked Conversations, which I’ve just had the pleasure of finishing reading. And what Rohit Bhargava was getting at when he apparently coined the term social media optimization (see Rohit’s “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)” to get what may be the most thorough articulation to date of what this is all about).

After, what, about 18 months of blogging, reading everything I can online and off, grappling with the changes that Web 2.0 functionalities have made to the Internet I thought I knew just a few years ago, I now see social media optimization as critical to any web strategy, for virtually any purpose of online communication. From my humble vantage point, SMO is clearly the real cake on which the icing of search engine strategies sits, if I can take Scoble’s analogy and sweeten it up a bit!

So yes, RSS-enable every web page published! Provide all the bookmarkeing and sharing functionality possible, certainly! Take the real-world community for your products, solutions and ideas and network and grow that community online over platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, then feed and nurture and grow with that community and watch things take off … and don’t worry about the search engines — they’ll take notice, guaranteed!

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